Hermes: enabling energy-efficient IoT networks with generalized deduplication.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is connecting a massive number of devices that generate a growing amount of data to be transmitted over the network. This traffic growth is expected to continue. Generalized deduplication (GD) is a novel technique to effectively compress the data to (a) reduce the data storage cost by identifying similar data chunks, and (b) reduce the pressure on the network infrastructure. This paper presents Hermes, an application-level protocol for the data-plane that can operate using GD as well as classic deduplication. Hermes significantly reduces the data transmission traffic while effectively decreasing the energy footprint, a key goal in many IoT deployments. We fully implemented Hermes, evaluated its performance using consumer-grade IoT devices (e.g., Raspberry Pi 4B), and highlighted key tradeoffs to be considered to manage real-world workloads. Several fold to several order of magnitude gains over standard compressors and deduplication are achievable.